


Spawn

by SleepsWithCoyotes



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M, Tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-12
Updated: 2016-03-12
Packaged: 2018-05-26 08:21:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6231259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SleepsWithCoyotes/pseuds/SleepsWithCoyotes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A husbandry experiment (not that kind) gets a little out of hand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spawn

**Author's Note:**

> Archiving old fic from 2013 - I actually haven't listened since ep 33, from the looks of things, so everything I post will likely be terribly non-canon-compliant. No comment spoilers, please--I do intend to get caught up!
> 
> ...yes, we're apparently having a fabulous tentacle weekend, which is why these are all getting posted in a bunch. :3

The main doors to the lab became a bottleneck a little before eleven, five grown scientists huddled just indoors and peering out into the rainy streets like hopeful children. Carlos didn't have any room to laugh; he was right there in the middle, taking deep breaths and trying to convince himself not to get too excited. The precipitation _smelled_ like water, and it wasn't stripping the paint off their cars--or making them dance, but that rain had been green. It might actually be honest-to-goodness, perfectly normal--

"Rain!" Teasdale yelped joyfully as he came bursting through the doors to his basement workspace, brandishing their cautiously-collected specimen vial aloft. "It's nothing but water! Okay, the particulate load's a little wonky, but--"

"Radiation?" Carlos asked sharply, throwing out both arms as a precaution before the others could break past him. Morris rubbed his nose, looking slightly rueful; holding the team back from their more adolescent impulses was usually his job.

"Utterly Night Vale normal," Teasdale pronounced, which wasn't to say it was safe. It just wasn't any _less_ safe than breathing, and they'd been managing that just fine.

Carlos smiled and dropped his arms. "Well? You heard the man."

With a whoop, Lindquist dashed out onto the sidewalk, throwing back his head and laughing as the others joined him. Carlos hesitated, years of training telling him he should be setting some kind of example, until Reilly gleefully shouted, "It's cold!"

That did it. He even shucked off his lab coat first, walking out into the rain with his palms tipped up to the sky.

It was still raining an hour later, though it'd tapered off from a downpour to a steady patter. Having ducked regretfully back inside long before the others, Carlos was mostly dry as he left for a lunch date with Cecil, finger-combing his hair in the rearview mirror until he gave it up with a sigh. He still couldn't explain Cecil's fascination with his hair; to him it always looked the same: messy.

The girl at the deli took his order distractedly, glancing up every few seconds to peer out the window as she assembled his gluten-free sandwiches. "Not the wolf apples," he had to remind her gently. "Just plain tomatoes, please."

"Oh, oops. Sorry about that. Um."

"Is there something wrong with the rain?" he asked point-blank. If she gave him a pitying look for it, he'd deal. A scientist was thick-skinned. That was the five hundred and _twelfth_ thing a scientist was.

"What? Uh...no. It's just rain. It just usually falls on the desert," she mumbled, chewing her lower lip.

Odd. But apparently not catastrophic.

"So, what do you want for the side items?"

The rain had petered out at last by the time he left the deli, a to-go sack and a bottled water in hand. He'd have gotten a drink for Cecil as well, but the man actually seemed to thrive on the station coffee, which had been known to eat through the pot if left to sit too long. Fishing his keys out of his coat pocket, Carlos was just about to climb back in his car when he noticed the small pothole by his front tire. Though he'd mistaken it for a puddle before, it was fairly substantial, a good three inches deep and eight inches wide. The odd thing was that there seemed to be a raft of tiny eggs glued to the edge of the hole.

_Frogspawn?_ he wondered as he dug into his pockets for gloves and an empty specimen bottle. When he turned up the former but not the latter, he heaved a frustrated sigh. It figured that the one day he actually took off his coat, something was bound to roll out of his pockets.

Well...it wasn't totally orthodox, but....

Being careful to pour his filtered water out where it couldn't leak into the pothole's fast-dwindling supply, he spared a sigh for unpreventable contamination as he dunked the empty water bottle to gather what he could. The egg raft was luckily malleable, squishing gelatinously as he fed it through the bottle's wide mouth, the tiny eggs stretching without breaking. The egg raft alone filled nearly half the bottle, and he could only hope the rainwater he'd collected would be enough to keep it hydrated until he had time to research proper spawning conditions.

Maybe it was the rain that made him feel like a kid doing his first experiments again. Not, he amended wryly, that he would have been encouraged to waste his time with zoology for long. Math and chemistry were what impressed his family; frogs, not so much.

Tucking his tightly-capped bottle into the drink holder behind the gearshift, Carlos climbed behind the wheel with a slow-growing grin. He'd always wanted a frog colony. One that had been wild-collected from Night Vale was bound to be spectacular.

***

The problem, Carlos realized three days later as he cringed to a halt, halfway between his car and the lab--the _problem_ was that his parents might have been the tiniest bit right about his frustrated zoological interests. He was, he consoled himself as he turned slowly back around, very good with equations. He could set up a study to run for months and never fail to collect his data precisely on time.

And yet, he admitted with a sigh as he pulled the car door back open, he hadn't been able to keep a single white mouse alive. It was terribly disheartening.

Three days ago his lunch with Cecil at the station had been interrupted by reports of a massive boom in the deer population. In between increasingly-apocalyptic speculation on what could cause a need for that many real estate agents, frantic calls to local contractors and the city planning department, and the eventual discovery that one of Desert Bluff's new subdivisions had been 'accidentally' zoned a little too close to Night Vale city limits--not to mention the fate of the suddenly-obsolete deer--he'd completely forgotten about the eggs he'd collected.

Reaching in for the water bottle that had been boiling away in his often-roasting car, Carlos fished it out gingerly, expecting to see nothing but a murky ooze of dirty water and decomposing slime. To say that he was surprised to find tadpoles instead was an understatement.

They looked normal enough as he held the clear bottle up to his eyes. Lumpy and black, a little translucent at the edges, with thin little tails like oversized flagella. He couldn't quite tell whether they had eyes or not, but maybe those became more prominent as the tadpoles developed. The point was that they were still alive, even though the cap had been sealed for three days; whatever oxygen content the water had had before, it must be completely depleted now.

A little excited and a lot nervous--maybe he shouldn't open the cap after all, because what if oxygen killed them?--he entered the lab with a spring in his step, heading for the break room where the team usually started their day. "So," he called as he opened the door, "what do we collectively know about raising fro-oh, _shit._ "

Years of dealing with volatile substances had him setting the bottle gently on the break room counter before lunging for the nearest fire extinguisher, charging at an enormous spider the size of a pit bull before it could leap at the defensive huddle his coworkers had made behind an overturned table. The spider _howled_ as he brought the heavy tank down on its furred thorax, whipping around on eight backward-jointed legs and gaping its mandibles on an actual jaw full of actual fangs, yellow eyes glaring.

Carlos hit it again, his own heart jumping as Reilly vaulted the makeshift barricade with a wild yell, broken chair-leg in hand. Morris and Borowicz were quick to join them, but while he could see Teasdale, the chemist was hanging back, and Jesus, Lindquist must be down. Not good.

He was breathing hard from more than adrenaline by the time the spider lay still, its choking death snarls still ringing in his ears. A glance at the far corner found Lindquist back on his feet, clutching his arm but only a little pale. "What was that thing?" Lindquist asked as Teasdale gently rolled back the arm of his lab coat. "Night Vale's idea of a wolf spider?"

Strangling on half-hysterical laughter, Carlos took a closer look at the thing at his feet and...yes. "I--think it's a spiderwolf, actually."

"We just killed the baseball mascot?" Reilly demanded, horrified.

"I'll, uh...just call Cecil and find out if these things are poisonous," Carlos said, avoiding her eyes entirely.

He was only a little sidetracked by the sudden snuffling, and scratching, and ominous _barking_ at the break room door.

***

"Hey, boss," Morris called two days later as he strolled over to Carlos' worktable. "Is this yours?"

Looking up from his microscope, he glanced over at Morris without really seeing the man, still pondering the slide he'd been studying. A few months ago, Telly the Barber had migrated from the sand wastes to the Whispering Forest, where instead of becoming a tree himself, he'd somehow gotten his hands on a pair of garden shears. "He's really spruced the place up," the trees had gushed to Carlos when he'd asked. "By the way, is that a new lab coat?"

He'd collected a handful of neatly-trimmed leaves before bidding the forest a polite farewell, nodding at the volunteer militia that always gathered whenever he set foot past the fence. He honestly wasn't certain why they were still surprised at his continued immunity; he'd spent an entire year foolishly ignoring much headier compliments from a man whose voice poured like warm melted chocolate directly into his lizard brain. Trees weren't even on his radar.

Initial analysis of the leaf samples had yielded some surprising results. Even as practiced as he was becoming at divorcing expectation from observation, discovering mammalian cell structures instead of--

"Boss?"

Carlos blinked. "Sorry," he said, "what?"

"This," Morris said with an understanding grin, holding out a familiar water bottle. "Is it yours? Because I think it may be past its due date."

Where the flotilla of tadpoles had been, now there was only _one_ tadpole, roughly half the size of his fist...with maybe twenty tails.

"Damn," he muttered forlornly as he took the bottle, staring at the creature that was left. It must have eaten all the others, or possibly absorbed them; it might have been avoidable if he'd given them a larger tank. "I knew I was forgetting something."

"What is it, anyway? And, uh...you do realize you left it in the break room, right?"

"Uh, yeah...sorry about that," Carlos said, chagrined. They'd all learned to make allowances for distraction, exhaustion and mustering to arms, but they'd also agreed that biological samples were the first to get cleaned up. "Anyway, it's--you remember the rain we had last week?"

"I thought that turned out to be normal," Morris said with a frown.

"Well, as far as I can tell it was. But when I was out getting lunch, I noticed this egg raft in a pothole by the deli, so I thought I'd see what spawned from them. These were tadpoles two days ago," he admitted. Strange how the remaining tadpole had only gotten bigger without growing any legs. "Huh."

"Boss?"

"Just, uh...wondering if we should be worried about frogbulls."

They laughed so hard they nearly upset the microscope when they both tried to lean on the table together, and somehow in the shuffle of saving the slide, explaining his findings, and explaining them again as the entire team gathered for a look, the water bottle with its monstrous contents got shoved to the edge of the table.

Where it sat. Quiet. Inoffensive. Its bloated, glistening occupant transfixed by Carlos' every move.

For the better part of a week.

***

Waking on a dissection table would ordinarily have worried Carlos, except that he'd brought the pillow from home himself, and some kind person had draped a spare lab coat over his legs. He must have looked chilly; nights did get cold in the desert. Practically tumbling off the slab as he rolled to his feet, he scrubbed a hand through his sleep-flattened hair, blinked grainy eyes until the world came vaguely into focus, and decided the lack of sirens, feral howling, or the long, slow scream of the universe dissolving to its original primordial soup must mean they'd managed to counteract the effects of Earth Day after all.

Passing Morris sprawled across his keyboard and Lindquist sacked out in the cradle of the anti-devolution ray he'd built, Carlos wasn't surprised to find he was the first one up. He made coffee; it was only polite.

Waiting for it to finish brewing, he staggered into his area of the lab, wondering if his samples had survived the chaos. The Whispering Forest itself had been desperately in need of Telly's services the last he'd seen it, some of the trees regressing to saplings and others to unsettling hybrids with human faces like a Disney forest gone terribly wrong. If his samples had become more human instead of less--

Forcing scratchy eyes open as he tried to peer into the microscope lens, he winced as he felt the beginnings of a migraine spike inside his skull. God, he was _parched._ He'd been all but living on coffee for the last three days, and now his temples throbbed, his cottonmouth was bordering on desiccation, and his GP--Teddy Williams, also owner of the Desert Flower Arcade Bowling Alley and Fun Complex--was going to have a few sharp words for him about taking care of his kidneys, he was sure.

Reaching absently for the familiar shape in his peripheral vision, he worked off the irritatingly-tight cap with a tired grunt and--

Jerking back from the table with a yell, he threw the bottle away from him. A thin spatter of dirty water sketched an arc across his worktable as the plastic bottle went careening loudly off into the corner, but it was too late. A glossy black mass of writhing tentacles had already come bursting out of the bottle's wide mouth, leaping for his chest before he could duck out of the way. Hands scrambling over himself as he tried to get a grip on the thing, he stumbled back, knocking over a desk chair, waiting all the while to feel the first gash of teeth or poisoned sting.

Some other time, he might have been embarrassed by the ridiculous way he flailed as the thing kept moving, fast and surprisingly heavy. Though his confused impression of it was of something nearly amorphous, its skin felt sturdy the few times he grazed it: cool and slightly damp, not nearly as slimy as it had looked. Feeling it retreat towards his shoulder blades, he tore off his coat, a shudder crawling down his spine that settled in at his lumbar region, his flesh prickling with weightless horror. Sure he had it trapped, he threw his coat as far away from him as he could manage and tottered unsteadily back, neck and shoulders panic-tense, head weighted down with--

"Oh, God," he breathed, frozen in place.

It was in his _hair._

Relax, he told himself. He just had to be quick, and he could yank it right off him. Easy. Except that it was still moving, drying tentacles winding through his hair and curling around stray tufts to hold it in place. Right. So maybe what he needed was assistance, only if his crashing about hadn't brought half the team running, then they were probably still unconscious from exhaustion. He could wait for someone to notice his predicament, by which time the creature might already have merged with his brain or eaten its way through his skull. Or....

Taking a deep breath, Carlos inched a cautious step forward. The creature gripped his hair a little more tightly as it caught its balance, but the warning bite he expected never materialized. He took another step. Another.

The creature...nestled. He couldn't see it, only feel it, but it was _his hair_ the thing was using as a bed of wood shavings, and if there was one thing Carlos remembered from his ill-fated attempt at starting a mouse colony, it was the nesting.

"Oh, fuck, no," he muttered, setting off for the bathroom at a determined clip, no longer worried about upsetting the thing on his head. It grabbed at him a little, but that was all.

Leaning close to the mirror with his hands planted on the sink, Carlos stared into huge, liquid black eyes--six of them--that stared placidly back between slow, contented blinks. It looked a little like an octopus except for the eyes and the overabundance of tentacles, though its body retained the bumpy tadpole shape. _Frogtopus?_ he wondered helplessly, lifting a hand to see if he could coax it loose now that they'd both calmed.

Two eyes swiveled to track his hand, their altered focus noticeable only in their shifting gleam. If it intended to attack, he figured it'd be now. Just now. Or maybe right about--

Uncoiling gracefully from his hair without pulling, one limb reached out and curled around his advancing forefinger the same way his sister's first kid had in the cradle, and Carlos slumped with a sigh, adrenaline washing out of him all at once.

Sometimes, he reminded himself tiredly, not _everything_ in Night Vale wanted to devour him on sight. Some things just wanted to leave him hopelessly mortified and inexplicably charmed.

"I should probably call Cecil," he mumbled aloud, but God, he was tired. He needed breakfast, at minimum a gallon of water and a shower, not necessarily in that order. Then he might just feel human enough to call his boyfriend and ask whether baby tentacle monsters regularly spawned from potholes after the rain and what exactly they ate.

If brains were on the list, then horrifically cute or not, all bets were off.

It wasn't the first time he'd used the lab's decontamination shower for personal reasons, and judging by the number and selection of hair care products just outside the stall, he doubted he was the only one. Just in case, in deference to his... _passenger,_ he borrowed the one that looked organic, resigned to smelling like a Fair Trade blend of mountain herbs for the rest of the day.

The creature, he was unsurprised to discover, liked the shower quite a bit. He was even able to untangle it from his hair, setting it on the floor where it slithered nimbly to inspect the drain, seemingly unaffected by the soap he washed away. It even let him get dressed again--and thank God he'd taken to leaving an emergency set of clothes in his office--only noticing it'd been abandoned as he was pulling on his last clean lab coat.

It was a good thing tomorrow was Saturday, because it was well past time for a laundry day.

"Whoa, hold on," he soothed as it spilled out of the tub in a mass of anxiously-grabbing limbs. It made to retreat into his hair again as he scooped it up, but when he held it off, it settled for wrapping around his arm and flattening down to a thick sleeve of intertwined limbs and wide, curious eyes.

He blamed Night Vale. Night Vale was the reason he had the vague urge to coo instead of flailing his arm around screaming. _Night Vale did this._

"We're going to go see Cecil now," he sighed, deciding that sneaking out of the lab before anyone could wake up--and panic--was probably the best idea.

Since he really needed two hands to drive and having one arm weighed down with approximately five pounds of clingy tentacles made it hard to shift gears, he pretended not to notice when a few arms stealthily uncurled and began creeping their way up to his shoulder. By the time he made it to the station, the creature was back in his hair again. It seemed content enough there when he caught sight of it in the rearview mirror, its round eyes spread out and blinking solemnly in six directions at once. There was no real tension in its coils, no sign of fear, but he braced himself anyway as he pulled in next to Cecil's car and climbed cautiously out, trying not to unbalance or startle his passenger. Ink would definitely be a problem. And didn't octopuses have beaks? Maybe frogtopuses just had the tongue. He wasn't sure that was better.

Though Cecil kept insisting Carlos could just let himself in during regular business hours, it always felt strange not to ring at the door instead. They were both professionals, after all. It never took long for the interns to answer, though the knowing twinkle in their eyes had been a little difficult to get past at first. He was wearing his lab coat, for goodness sake. Was it that impossible to believe he might be stopping by for scientific reasons?

Maybe if he remembered to take the coat off on his and Cecil's dates. Or when he went to the grocery store. And sometimes to bed, but those were only extreme cases, really.

He was pleased to see a face he knew when the door opened; Intern Betty had greeted him three times now, her cheerful smile still free of nervous tics. "Well, hello!" she said as she pulled the door open wider, stepping back to let him through. "How are things going in the science wuh--"

He'd half let himself hope the creature on his head would simply blend in with his hair; they were practically the same color, and his hair did tend to curl when it was still damp from the shower. Sadly that didn't appear to be the case. Betty's mouth dropped slowly open, but instead of screaming, she fell to her knees like her tendons had been cut, staring up at him with enormous, white-ringed, _awestruck_ eyes.

Oh, God. He wasn't wearing a _soft meat crown,_ was he? Because a baby tentacle monster wasn't really what he'd pictured whenever Cecil brought those up.

"Erm," he said, shuffling gingerly past when Betty shrank shyly away from him as he tried to raise her back to her feet. "I'll just, uh...go see Cecil now."

She nodded weakly, like she wasn't really hearing his words at all, leaving him to beat a quick retreat down the hall.

He really hoped Cecil could explain this one to him, because blaming Night Vale was only going to get him so far.

Pulling out his phone, he texted a message swiftly while staying out of sight, not wanting to interrupt the show if Cecil were to glance through the booth window and have an atypical reaction to Carlos' unorthodox headgear. It belatedly occurred to him that he could try to get the creature _off_ his head, but it wasn't all that heavy and the position kept it conveniently out of the way, so he supposed it could stay. For now.

_"Oh!"_ he heard over the station speakers with for-once gratifying speed. _"Listeners, it looks like our favorite scientist may need our help! I've just received a text from Carlos, who says he's here at our station. Let's go now to a prerecorded message from our sponsors, and I'll return with more news after the break."_

He suspected it wasn't entirely fair of him to step into the booth while Cecil's back was turned, but with limited time allotted for explanations, he didn't want to waste a second. Cecil was already rising as Carlos shut the door behind him, taking off his headphones as Carlos closed half the distance, and when he turned--

"Carlos!" Cecil gasped, staring at the top of his head. "You've _spawned._ "

"Uh," he said, grateful Cecil hadn't dropped worshipfully to his knees but too confused to pay that the attention it deserved. "No, uh-- _I_ haven't spawned--"

"No, of course not," Cecil said dismissively, "that would be weird. I mean you've helped a new Master to spawn."

"Um...Master?" He wasn't sure he liked the sound of that.

"Like Station Management," Cecil explained, giving him the encouraging smile he was both mortified by and entirely grateful for.

"Oh," he said, frowning. " _Oh._ Like--are you _serious_?"

Cecil shrugged. "So the stories say. Night Vale was thoroughly, _thoroughly_ seeded a long time ago with eggs, but you only see them after a rain, and the rain mainly falls on the desert--and even when it doesn't, the conditions are almost never right for a proper spawning. Usually the small fry swim off and join City Council or the Hooded Figures, but you've really fed this one up beautifully! You should talk to the Sheriff--his was the last Master to spawn, you know, and I'm sure he could tell you all about it."

"Wait." The Sheriff. Station Management. "Are you saying it's going to grow up to be...?"

"An institution!" Cecil said gleefully. "You're definitely going to need interns. Deputies? What do scientists call their minions? I've never asked."

_Minions,_ he was tempted to reply, but no--that was mad scientists, and that was definitely not _him._ Yet. "Assistants," he said faintly.

Cecil's eyes softened all at once, as if he'd finally noticed that Carlos wasn't as unequivocally thrilled as he was. "Don't worry. You'll be a _brilliant_ Scientist," he said, only this time Carlos could hear the capitals. "My gorgeous, amazing, impossible--"

Cecil's hand had been creeping steadily up towards Carlos' cheek, possibly his hair, but Cecil froze with a sharp breath as a glossy black tentacle whipped out and slapped him on the knuckles. _Mine,_ the little creature might just as well have shouted. _Hands off._

Heart in his throat, he expected Cecil to back meekly away, heartbroken but obedient. Instead Cecil drew himself up with a furious gasp to his full--if average--height, eyes flashing, shoulders flexing as he loomed as best he could over a creature that probably had an inch on him from its rarified perch.

He was trying to make himself look _bigger._

From the nest of his hair, Carlos could feel the little creature doing the same.

Chuckling helplessly, he reached up and pulled the freshly-spawned Master down, shaking his head. Though he was half-tempted to pass the... _honor,_ he supposed, to someone else, the thought of all he could do for the town--for Cecil--was a little too tempting to pass up.

"Sorry," he said with a fond smile for both of them, ignoring the agitated twist of knotting arms, Cecil's infuriated huff. "I'm afraid you're just going to have to share."


End file.
